Sunday, May 14, 2017

Q and A on the Semantics of “Vice President as Coordinator” and “Chook”

In this week’s Q and A, I am only able to feature two
questions: the meaning of the (in)famous description of Vice President Yemi
Osinbajo as a “coordinator” of the nation in presidential communication to the
Senate and the proper verb to use to denote piercing of the skin.

Question:

President
Muhammadu Buhari, in his recent letter to the Senate, wrote, “While I am away,
the Vice President will coordinate the activities of the government.” This is generating
a lot of controversy in Nigeria at the moment. From the perspective of
language, what would you say? Did the president err? Or are people overreacting?

Answer:

The
president’s choice of words represents, for me, an interesting clash of content
and context and of denotation and connotation. On the surface (that is, in terms
of content and denotation), the intent of the letter appears harmless and unambiguous:
Yemi Osinbajo was elected Vice President, and has now been temporarily tasked
with “[coordinating] the activities of the government” in the absence of the
president. Looks normal.

But
when you dig beyond the surface, that is, when you go into the terrain of
context and connotation, it isn’t normal. First, because there can’t be a
vacuum in governance, the person who stands in for the President while he is
away for an extended period (and temporarily relinquishes his office) can no
longer be addressed by his or her former title. In other words, Osinbajo can no
longer be addressed as Vice President; he is properly the Acting President
until the president returns and takes over from him. The president’s letter
anticipates that Osinbajo would act as a temporary replacement for him.

To
refer to Osinbajo as “Vice President” in the same sentence where “while I am
away” appears implies that the president will still exercise substantive powers
from his hospital bed in London. But the overall spirit of the letter vitiates
that sense. After all, the letter said the president had no idea when he would
return.

Similarly,
when you read the letter merely “on the lines,” you might be led to suppose
that the president actually intended to transfer substantive powers to the vice
president when he said the VP would “coordinate the activities of the
government” (since that is what the president presumably does), but reading “between
the lines” leads to a different conclusion.

Here
is where context comes in. Recall that Dr. Ngozi Okonjo-Iweala used to be
called “Minister of Finance and Coordinating Minister of the Economy.” In spite
of her gratuitously superfluous title (who else but the finance minister should
coordinate the economy?), she was still just a minister. Her being “coordinating
minister” didn’t make her the president.

Referring
to Osinbajo as Vice President and coordinator “of the activities of the government”
undercuts and undermines his power as Acting President. It means that, just
like Okonjo-Iweala, he is still Vice President (presumably answerable to a
higher authority in Abuja while the president is away) who is nonetheless
saddled with an additional, extra-constitutional responsibility to “coordinate
the activities of the government.”

If
the letter had said, “While I am away, the Acting President will coordinate the
activities of the government,” the “coordinator” part of the sentence would
have been of no consequence. It goes without saying that the president “coordinates
the activities of the government,” and that whoever acts as his substitute
would do the same. The fact that the letter had a need to state the obvious
while not conceding the title of “Acting President” to a person who is standing
in for the president raises a legitimate semantic quandary.

But
it may well be that the drafter or drafters of the president’s letter are mere incompetent
users of the English language, which would render all the feverish interpretive
frenzy the letter has generated pointless.

Question:

When
an object, such as a needle, penetrates one’s body, what verb should we use to
convey that? Is it “chook,” “chuk,” or “shuck”?

Answer:

None
of the above. West African Pidgin English speakers, of course, use the word
“chook” (sometimes spelled “chuk”) where Standard English speakers would say “pierce,”
“prick,” or “poke,” and the usage appears to have crept into Nigerian Standard
English. (My definition of West African Pidgin English includes Cameroonian
Pidgin English because it shares the same ancestry and structural attributes
with other West African English-based pidgins and creoles).

The
descriptivist in me would say “chook” is all fine and good since almost all
Nigerian (and Cameroonian) English speakers understand what it means. Mutual
understanding is the whole point of communication.

But
I am assuming that you want to know if “chook” is comprehensible to other
English speakers outside West Africa. Here is what I wrote on this in my
September 2, 2012 column titled “The English Nigerian Children Speak (I)”:

“Chook:
This is the word Nigerian children use where their counterparts in America and
Britain would use ‘poke’ or ‘jab.’ Where Nigerian children would say, ‘I’ll
chook you with this pencil,’ their American counterparts would say, ‘I’ll poke
you with this pencil.’

“When
I looked up ‘chook’ in the dictionary, I discovered that it is the alternative
name for chicken in Australian and New Zealand English. I also found that
people in Jamaica, Trinidad and Tobago, Barbados, The Bahamas, and other
English-speaking Caribbean nations (most of whose inhabitants trace their
ancestral roots to Nigeria, by the way) also use ‘chook’ in their informal
English the way Nigerian children use it.

“This
leads me to guess that the word is probably derived from a Nigerian language.
Or it could very well be of Portuguese origin, which has contributed a few
words to Nigerian Pidgin English, such as ‘pikin’ (which speakers of Jamaican
Patois also use to mean ‘child’), sabi (know), palava (trouble), dash (gift),
etc.”

Since
writing that column, I also found out that “chook” is derived from the Middle
English name for “chicken.” In Middle English (spoken from about 1100 to 1450),
chicken was called “chukken.” By Shakespearean times (that is, from 1564 to1616),
the word became “chuk,” and was also used as a term of endearment for a person.
That is the sense of the term we find in Shakespeare’s Macbeth when he wrote: “Be innocent of the knowledge, dearest chuck.”

In
parts of Britain (particularly Yorkshire and Liverpool) and in the whole of
Australia and New Zealand, “chuk” (now spelled “chook”) still retains its early
Modern English meaning of “chicken.”

So,
clearly, the West African (Pidgin) English “chook” (or “chuk”), which is also
present in Caribbean English, has no relation with the Australian/New Zealand/Yorkshire/Liverpool
“chook.” It is therefore reasonable to assume that the “chook” in West African
Pidgin English is derived from a West African language. My initial guess was
that it was an Igbo word.

My
guess was informed by the popular alliterative joke about a boy named Chukwu
who was crying because he was pierced by a thorn. The joke goes that someone
asked Chukwu’s sister why Chukwu was crying and she said, “Chuku-chuku chuk
Chukwu!” That is, a thorn (which is called “chuku-chuku” in Nigerian and
Cameroonian Pidgin English) poked (or “chuk”/ “chooked”) Chukwu.

This
led me to think that “chuku-chuku” was the Igbo word for thorns, and that the
Pidgin English verb “chook” or “chuk” derived from it. But I have found out
that the Igbo word for thorn is “ogwu,” not “chuku-chuku,” and that “Chuku” is
the alternate spelling for “Chukwu,” which means God in Igbo.

It’s
entirely possible that “chuk” and “chuku-chuku” are loans from a southern Cameroonian
language. When I find out the source of this interesting word, I will write an
update.Related Articles:Politics of Grammar Column

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About Me

Dr. Farooq Kperogi is a professor, journalist, newspaper columnist, author, and blogger based in Greater Atlanta, USA. He received his Ph.D. in communication from Georgia State University's Department of Communication where he taught journalism for 5 years and won the top Ph.D. student prize called the "Outstanding Academic Achievement in Graduate Studies Award." He earned his Master of Science degree in communication (with a minor in English) from the University of Louisiana at Lafayette and won the Outstanding Master's Student in Communication Award.

He earned his B.A. in Mass Communication (with minors in English and Political Science) from Bayero University, Kano, Nigeria, where he won the Nigerian Television Authority Prize for the Best Graduating Student.

Dr. Kperogi worked as a reporter and news editor, as a researcher/speech writer at the (Nigerian) President's office, and as a journalism lecturer at Kaduna Polytechnic and Ahmadu Bello University before relocating to the United States.

He was the Managing Editor of the Atlanta Review of Journalism History, a refereed academic journal. He was also Associate Director of Research at Georgia State University's Center for International Media Education (CIME).

He is currently an Associate Professor of Journalism and Emerging Media at the School of Communication and Media, Kennesaw State University, Georgia's fastest-growing and third largest university. (Kennesaw is a suburb of Atlanta). He also writes two weekly newspaper columns: "Notes From Atlanta" in the Abuja-based DailyTrust on Saturday (formerly Weekly Trust) and "Politics of Grammar" in the DailyTrust on Sunday (formerly Sunday Trust).

In April 2014 Dr. Kperogi was honored as the Outstanding Alumnus of the University of Louisiana's Department of Communication. His research has also won international awards, such as the 2016 Top-Rated Research Paper Award at the 17th Symposium on Online Journalism at the University of Texas, Austin, USA.